


New Skin

by futurelounging



Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: F/M, Gotham's Writing Workshop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-31
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-03-11 18:24:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13529985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/futurelounging/pseuds/futurelounging
Summary: Week 2 Prompt Gotham's Writing Workshop(Young) Ian Murray's thoughts about the loves and losses of his life, as he watches from the outskirts at a funeral of someone dear to him.





	New Skin

Ian absentmindedly scratched at the bites on his neck as he waited in the shadows of the willow. He was rich in friends, in family, in countless moments of perfect harmony with the world around him, when even the biting flies receded into the woods and left his aging skin alone. A loose bit of bark curled in on itself and he pulled at it, recalling a time so many years ago, so far away, when he skinned his first rabbit. The feel of the hide pulling away from the flesh echoing the burgeoning man inside him, ripping away from the boy he’d been. Men, he had learned, tear themselves apart and hope their scar tissue is enough to hold them together.

 

Ian retreated further into the shadows as more people arrived. His son craned his neck above the crowd, a gangly new version of himself, minus the tattoos and rough, wrinkled skin. Ian had let the sun take its price out on his flesh, let the wild branches of the forest scar him as he careened through it, let the razor-sharp rocks in the beds of streams exact revenge on his careless soles. He’d left his skin in Scotland and wore a rough hide to the new world. With each piece of ripped flesh, each burn, each scrape, he lost a little of it in the hopes that one day it would all be gone, and he’d be born anew.

 

His son’s arms pulled her closer, holding her upright amidst the swaying mourners and he recalled every moment since he first met her when the words lodged in his throat, when he ached for her to know him in a way she never could. _Ye canna imagine, Rachel, what it is to know yourself more a curse than a man._

 

She was daylight, moonlight, starlight, candlelight, every illumination to his perpetual night. He lived in the night. He relished the shifting of sounds as the nocturnals rose. The damp fog that clung to the surface of the forest floor, wrapping itself around his bone-white ankles. He walked into the dark forest at night and listened for them, his lost children. He heard them playing in the moonlit stream, felt them brush past his thighs as they jumped off the rocky ledge, daring him to chase them. When he returned home, steam would rise from his skin from the heat of the fire and he’d breathe in the perfume of his sleeping children’s heads, damp with sweat. He’d make a pillow of Rachel’s hair, cascading around her, and hear her dreams through the sighs and hitches in her breathing.

 

The sun was reaching its highest point, and he pushed sweat-soaked loose strands of hair back over his ears. Eyes age with the rest of you, he thought as he watched his wife. She seemed as lovely to him now as she did in the beginning. More so. He preferred the grey streaks in her hair, the permanent crows’ feat indentations by her eyes, every line, freckle, and scar a timeline of their life together. Bearing children left deep lines in her skin and he recalled one night, when it was too hot for anyone to sleep, that she let him make a paint of some crushed rock, and he drew red rivers over her stomach, down her thighs, then led her down to the creek to wash it all away. Painting her was the closest he could come to explaining to her what it felt like to live in different skins, to have left your first skin in a land you’d never again see.

 

Ian didn’t lament this unknown between the two of them. She knew things about him that he himself did not understand. She owned his new skin as much as he ever would. But under the willow tree, hiding in the shadows, Ian whispered his old language into the heavy summer air, to wherever his uncle’s spirit had gone, the last of those who had known him before, who had known what he looked like hunting on the moors, who remembered his long legs scrambling over rocks in the burns, carelessly unaware of his own skin.


End file.
